Crushing of Soviet Georgia Protest Said to Show Reforms’ Frailty

The dispersal by riot troops of nationalist demonstrations in the southern Soviet republic of Georgia this month showed how the country’s political reforms could be quickly ended, six deputies to the new, elected Soviet Parliament warned Wednesday.

In an angry denunciation of the action as brutal, unjustified and threatening all political reform here, the lawmakers accused the troops of using a toxic gas against some youths and of beating and hacking at others with shovels to break up a peaceful demonstration in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, on April 9.

Twenty civilians were killed, according to government accounts, but Georgian political dissidents have put the figure at more than 36, with dozens of others missing. Officials put the number of injured requiring hospitalization at 273.

Cover-Up Attempt

The six lawmakers, declaring their determination to use their new positions to push for social justice, accused the Soviet authorities--local, military and central--of attempting to cover up both the means used to suppress the demonstrations and the results.

After days of firm official denials that any gas or chemical agent was used, the government newspaper Izvestia on Wednesday quoted the Georgian minister of health, Irakliy Menagarishvili, as saying that the country’s leading toxicologists have concluded that the substance used on protesters was “an irritant and atropine-like in effect.”

This substance, so far unidentified, was believed to have contributed to “some” of the deaths, a public commission appointed by the Georgian Supreme Soviet, the republic’s parliament, had said Tuesday, making clear its intention to conduct a full investigation of this aspect of the incident.

While Soviet authorities acknowledged earlier this week that tear gas was used “in two places” to disperse the crowd, estimated at 8,000 to 10,000, an “atropine-like” substance, possibly inducing paralysis and even death through combined cardiac and respiratory failure, could mean that chemical weapons intended for combat were used against the demonstrators.

Although the situation in Tbilisi is reported as far calmer now after the withdrawal of the army and riot troops this week, the Georgian political consciousness will remain deeply scarred for a long time, officials have acknowledged, and the healing will depend on the honesty and openness with which the incident is investigated.

Givi G. Gumbaridze, the new head of the Georgian Communist Party, said in a nationally televised interview on Wednesday that “a dialogue with all groups, all sections of society is needed.”

“The people must learn all the truth, and they will be participating in establishing the truth of what happened,” he said of the April 9 clashes.

The party had to learn, as did others, to remain calm through debate and to see that it is a way forward for the country, he said.

But the readiness of some officials to use military force to suppress political dissent has, at the same time, alarmed members of the newly elected Congress of People’s Deputies, who contend that it undermines the whole reform process, known as perestroika, begun by President Mikhail S. Gorbachev four years ago.

“In this entire operation, it is the tendency toward instilling fear into people that causes concern,” the six deputies, who went to Tbilisi immediately after the clashes, wrote in the avant-garde weekly newspaper Moscow News, giving a full-page summary of their own investigation into the “Tbilisi tragedy.”

“And we were really scared . . . for the fate of democratic renewal, for the fate of perestroika. Maybe we exaggerate a little . . . but in all that happened in Tbilisi could be seen a sort of model of how perestroika could be cut short.”

Unlike most Soviet officials and the central, state-controlled news media, the six deputies did not start with the assumption that the demonstrators, participants in one of Tbilisi’s prolonged political protests, were at fault because their all-day, all-night rally outside government offices was “unsanctioned” and because longtime dissidents had spoken.

Their report calls for new laws that “truly, genuinely will be defending perestroika, “ protecting the right of political expression, and “not to put it in mortal danger,” referring to new laws whose protection of dissent is ambiguous.

The report was signed by Yegor V. Yakovlev, editor of the Moscow News; a Georgian film-maker, Eldar Shengelaya; three prominent cinema directors, Alexander Gelman, Mikhail Belikov and Dmitri Lunkov, and a popular novelist, Boris Vasilyev.